I was born to create.
Creativity and making things has always been an integral part of my life – as a ‘girl boss’ since the age of 10, I have always had a deep need to physically create, and have experimented with many different media and creative modes over the years.
Like a winding river, my life has taken many bends and turns, allowing me to be everything from a dancer, to a competitive swimmer, to performing circus arts, as well as painting, pottery, printmaking, weaving, costume making, glass arts and everything in between. I have managed art galleries, events, and studio tours, and been part of the arts community for over 25 years.
Unfortunately, I got caught up in the oft repeated and promoted notion that everything creative should be monetized…we see the pressure from media in every direction: if you can make something, you should be selling it! In the age of Etsy, Shopify, and others, why wouldn’t you?
Just like any other artist out there, I wanted the dream – making a livable income from doing something I loved. The reality, however, was that I ended up lost in the labyrinth of media, marketing, and mass production.
I sold at art shows and craft fairs at first, then added e-commerce, and I soon realized that I was starting to just mass-produce pieces…repeating designs and ideas and just churning them out for sale. My work started to feel repetitive and stale, and left me with no energy to just take the time to play and try new things because making pieces for sale was priority. With bills to pay, I fell into the horrible pit of productivity rather than creativity, and lost the original spark that made me love working with glass!
I originally got into glasswork because after everything I have done and tried, glass speaks to me. I love working with it and being creative with this phenomenal medium, but I ended up feeling trapped and too stressed out to make anything truly new. Something needed to change.
It became abundantly clear that the only way out of the trap was to find a space where my creativity could be independent of any financial or media pressures. Not an easy thing to do once you’ve ‘quit your day job to run your arts business full time!’ (sound familiar?)
I decided to give myself a little ‘glass arts retreat’ so I could forget the world, my problems, pressures, and everything else that wasn’t glass. What a difference that made – knowing I had the opportunity to just create again for the sake of creating…I almost didn’t know where to start! However, that well-spent time helped me reconnect to myself, my glass, and enabled me to create my internationally recognized glassworking techniques.
My kiln-blown glass has brought me global recognition for creating and developing new techniques with the medium, used as an example in arts education institutions around the world. My experience running online businesses has also made me an e-commerce specialist providing consultation to other artists and small businesses looking to get set up online.
I’m so excited to be bringing all of my experience to others who have also fallen into the bottomless pit of media and mass production, helping them reconnect to their creative spark so their dreams and passions can once again take flight.
